About 3 years ago I read the Pragmatic Programmer and it talked about using a shell. It mentioned about how powerful it was and all the things you could do that you just couldn't do with a UI in windows. I took what it said to heart and looked into it and downloaded Cygwin. I choose Cygwin because it was a bash shell and that is what Ubuntu used along with Mac, and I figured I might try to switch to one of those platforms one day. I installed it played with it a little, but it just had a hard time sticking at first, I couldn't see what I would use it for.
Then I started working with a guy that just loved the shell. He is the type of guy that has emacs open all the time to mange tasks and other things. I started seeing all the things he was doing and was impressed, I decided to keep it around and started playing a little more with some commands and started to find enough uses to keep it around.
Then the final straw happened, I went to a talk about Mercurial and decided to start using it. Cygwin comes with it, so I started using the command line for using Mercurial. With that I started writing scripts to make it easier to work with, I started modifying my prompt to show me things about my repository. Then I started writing more and more scripts to help me do anything that I had to do more then once every month or so.
I have gotten to the point that I have no idea how I would get along with out it. Between find, grep, symbolic links, powerful scripting, non invasive mercurial and svn integration, tail and many more. I am sure that as I keep going I will keep picking up more and more things I won't be able to do with out.
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